


Even as Love is, Undivided and Paceless (to give with joy remix)

by Red



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Female Erik Lehnsherr, Growing Old Together, Marriage Proposal, Remix, Secret Marriage, Trans Female Character, Transitioning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2157273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first ten anniversaries, they spend apart. But for each one after, Erika finds herself suffering yet another extravagant gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. paper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cygnaut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnaut/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Seven Blessings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177890) by [cygnaut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnaut/pseuds/cygnaut). 



> Thank you to cygnaut for the beautiful original, and to my cheerleading team of youdidnotseeme and metronariston.

They were on the road, a long stretch of highway behind and ahead and the stark desert surrounding, when the idea first occurred to him. 

Erika was driving, as she usually would, and he folded the map again. Still over a hundred miles to Vegas, and he had thought only, _plenty time for her to consider the advantages if I ask right now_.

“You know,” he had started, glancing at her, taking in the sharp beauty of her profile, “there isn’t any waiting period on the marriage licenses, out here.” 

Admittedly, it had been an abysmal way to ask. Erika had just stared at him as if he’d lost his senses, controlling the car absently with her power. 

“I won’t ask why you know that,” she’d said. “But I will remind you, it would hardly be legal. Or prudent.” 

He had smiled, because “not prudent” was as good as a yes, and he reached over to pat her leg. 

“They have to recognize it outside state lines. That’s federal law. And as for the rest, just let me worry about it.” 

A hundred miles later, miraculously she did, she let him deal with the whole thing. They walked into the courthouse, Erika with her back straight and head high, as if daring the clerk for trouble; and after Charles had paid up the nominal fee and signed some papers, they stood before the judge. 

He shared how they all saw her, in that moment, mind-to-mind. 

Being wed hadn’t ever been something Charles had thought on for long. He had always thought, perhaps. Someday. Someday he’d have a wife, the sort of ceremony expected of his station. But it was never more than that: a ceremony, expected of his station. 

When he saw Erika, the way she wiped at her eyes as if angry, he had felt certain he’d never made a better decision. That he’d never make another quite this wise, that he’d never be happier, even if they would have to keep this all a secret. 

The license wound up in his luggage that night, when they celebrated in a cheap off-strip hotel, and the year wouldn’t be out before she left him. 

The mansion feels empty as it did when he was a child. Often, he wanders those halls he can still access—Hank keeps planning renovations, but Charles keeps putting them off, failing to see the purpose—trying not to dwell on the absences. 

One spring night, he’s in his study. It’s late. Everyone else is asleep. Their thoughts as distant as his sister, as his wife, and he’s utterly alone. He’s supposed to be going over some paper Hank wrote, but the words are swimming and senseless, and he winds up spilling his drink and cursing, grabbing clumsily at the mess of papers to save them.

An envelope falls from the bottom of the heap. 

There could be any number just like it in his study, the ubiquitous buff colour of a manila envelope. Charles knows, immediately, what’s in this one. 

For a long time, he just stares. He just wants to burn the damned thing, to rip it up. In his short time with her, they’d never had a moment for more than a document.

He’d never managed to get her a ring. 

This is the only evidence he has left, and he wants nothing more than to destroy it, to obliterate Erika from his history completely. But there’s little hope of that. She’ll haunt him for the rest of his days, she’s made sure he can’t even reach to get a fucking bit of paper off the floor. 

In the end, Hank winds up tidying the study. The envelope winds up shoved on top of old journals and newspapers, and Charles spends a few weeks glaring at it, considering throwing it in the fireplace. 

Erika sends him a letter in the summer. She doesn’t beg forgiveness, she doesn’t mention their union. It’s no more than a few lines, simple and brief, letting him know Raven is well. 

Charles scrawls the return address on the outside of that envelope from their days in Vegas, copies the false name she’s picked up for this year. 

Perhaps it will never reach her. She’s likely moved on, she's probably given a false address along with the name. 

Little matter. He doesn’t want to see it again. 

He doesn’t write his return address.

He doesn’t include a note.


	2. cloth

The next he sees her, it’s in a photo on a classified document. It’s late October, and he’s never more glad he was rid of the license that summer. 

She’s a monster, he thinks to himself often. The seasons pass, one after another, the distance growing onward from the days he spent with her at his side. 

There’s no shortage of matters to distract him in the mansion, these days. They’re rebuilding Cerebro. There’s a constant influx of new students, new powers, new minds. With his every hour devoted to teaching, he’s able to forget that summer. He’s nearly able to lose himself well enough to forget everything else Erika stole from him, too, and he’s eternally relieved. The mansion is full and bright, he doesn’t know how he’d ever done without teaching, and for once there’s no mystery in where Erika’s holed up. 

By now there’s an elevator in the mansion, a wealth of halls and rooms open to him once more. It’s summer again when he’s in the room that was once hers, cleaning it out with a single-minded determination. They’ll need it for a student, one day—though it’s grand enough that he’ll wind up feeling guilty giving it to anyone but one of the boys, Hank or Alex or Sean, all of whom are very much settled in their own spaces—and it isn’t as if she left anything personal. 

She always had travelled light. The mansion had been another mere stopping point, a pin on a map to finishing Shaw, and there's little for him to throw out. A book. A watch. Some sunglasses. 

He pulls out one of the drawers in the massive armoire, emptying it of turtlenecks and slacks. The clothes are functional, no need to toss them, he's sure he can tolerate passing them on to a future student. He starts piling them into separate bag.

Shirt after shirt, he isn’t looking or thinking as he works. When his fingers brush lace, he startles. 

At the very bottom of the drawer, folded neatly, there’s a lone nightgown. His hands tighten on it, balling it up. He should just chuck it, but it’s like he’s under a spell. Lifting it out, he lets it unfurl, the chiffon skirt and the nylon slip and the lacy bodice, and he remembers Erika wearing it for the first time. 

How could he forget? It’s nothing she would have bought, nothing she would have dared waste her money or energy on, herself. And it’s also fairly conservative, all things considered—Charles bought it for her at a Woolworth’s that summer, somewhere in Iowa—but she’d still been speechless.

She wouldn’t put it on the night he gave it to her, or the next. They drove miles and miles, until they found a hotel remote and near to abandoned, and she tugged the drapes shut. 

She’d been so beautiful in it, shy and blushing, as if they hadn’t yet been intimate. Charles had been breathless, intoxicated by her completely. He touches the chiffon and remembers how it felt, the heat of her body. The way she sighed. 

He folds it again, places it in his lap. 

Two days later, they would marry. He needs to wipe every part of her from his memory, but it’s been two years, and still he can’t.


	3. steel

Their tenth anniversary, she’s still under the Pentagon. 

The years are a blur, the months up to when Logan appeared in the mansion hazy, and all he remembers of that November is a sense of being disoriented, massively and constantly so. Seeing himself through Logan’s eyes, the image blurry and the light strange, vainly preoccupied with his future self. Seeing Erika at his side, the shock of learning Logan was telling the truth, that one day they’d be together again. 

The unsurprising fact that she’d happily grow old as miserable as she is now. 

And then there’s seeing Erika again, seeing her in the flesh, seeing her as he’s never really done.

There’s a second where all he can do is stare, completely unable to comprehend her without sensing her thoughts. Then the anger of the past swells in him, grows massive enough to fill up the strange void where she once was, and he can move again. 

In the jet, later, they fumble toward reconciliation. And she comes to him in the hotel, and he's missed her, and he's been without for ages. 

At best, it's unsettling without his powers. He presses his face against her shoulder, tries to remember how it was with her, before. 

After a while, she shoves him away. She dresses with her back to him. 

The next summer, she'll wander back to the mansion. By then, he'll have given up the serum, he'll have taken her various “revolutionary” acts in the interim as little more than ill-thought stunts. It’s difficult, he’ll find, believing her as cruel as he thought her in the past decade. There’s nothing she does in ‘73 that’s anything like shooting his sister, or him. 

She’ll be injured, trusting he’ll let her lie low for the last of the summer. Lurking in her old room, nursing a broken arm and ankle, he at first ignores her. But she will grow bored, her mind calling to him, and he’s always found an unoccupied Erika to be a singularly dangerous creature. 

He soon begins visiting her. They’re wary around one another, but gradually the visits become a slow romance, the steady build of flirtation that they skipped entirely in ‘62. 

Their eleventh anniversary falls in that delicate time, and Charles will want to mark it somehow. Still not sure of her, not sure how she’d take any conventional gift, so he’ll consider himself lucky it’s the eleventh and not the twelfth or thirteenth. 

What he brings her is, in retrospect, a bit absurd. It’s an old blade, made of true Damascus. He’d just thought she’d like the _sense_ of it, that’s all that was in his mind. 

The moment he’s in the room with it, she sits up, snatching it from him with her powers. 

Mid-air, it melts. Erika transforms it into a sphere, lets it drop and crack against the floor. 

“What is this,” she demands. “What are you doing?” 

“Erika—”

“Symbolic, I trust. Cutting your ties? It’s fortunate you needn’t concern yourself with the hassles of a divorce.” She’s got the covers pulled up around her waist, her chin high, and he hasn’t seen her so vulnerable, not since the day they were wed. 

The sphere has rolled toward one of the wheels on his chair, either by accident or by her design, and he’s not able to look at Erika. He stares, instead, at the ground. She’s kept the grain of Damascus steel intact, despite the transformation. 

“That wasn’t my intent,” he says. 

But it’s no longer the past, he’s no longer without his powers. Whatever his intent was, it’s not enough for her. Not right now. 

He unlocks the brakes on his chair and, not trusting himself to say anything else, he leaves.


	4. silver and pearl

It takes almost a decade before, one day, she settles with him for good. By then, the Brotherhood is all but obsolete, and by then he’s learned a little more of how to navigate this life with her. There are another five that she passes, living as she’s done for her whole life. He takes it for granted that they’ll continue on this way, to hide what they are to each other. 

She ignores the scrutiny of the students, remaining at the periphery of the school. For those five years, they grow to see her less and less as a threat. Charles grows used to having her around, at a distance in the halls and sneaking into his bed at night. It’s almost like it was decades ago, except he’s got substantially less hair. 

There are dresses, skirts, stockings; another nightgown and another. Now that she’s back with him, he is forever buying her these little things despite her indignation, no matter the date. She wears them all for him and him alone, in the dark of his room. 

On their twenty-fifth anniversary, they’re together. Remembering the eleventh, he’s not keen to repeat the misstep and buy her some impressive antiquity, overpriced and appealing only to her mutation. Yes, she kept the sword’s remains, but all the same—that night, she feels the necklace long before he fastens it on her neck. 

She’s wearing a short silk robe, the sash tied low, showing off her chest. The thick weight of silver is stunning, an intricate Spratling design he thought would compliment her long neck. He’d not been wrong, and she grumbles about the excess as she straddles him. 

It’s within the week that she starts taking the medications. He never asks her where she got them—he imagines a raid of some sort, that he doesn’t want to know—and he doesn’t ask what finally brought it about. For a woman so confrontational, she has always been unnervingly reticent about the simple fact she’s female. He thought she always would, and so to be honest, Charles will find it a relief to have her glaring everyone down in the halls. 

Five years after, he’ll see the first time she’s come anywhere near trusting a doctor who isn’t Hank. And that’s really only after Hank more-or-less shoves them in the Blackbird and flies them to Colorado. 

When she wakes from the anaesthesia, she is reaching for him in her mind, disoriented and afraid. Already beside her bed, he leans in to kiss her cheek. 

“Hush. It went beautifully,” he whispers as he feels her settle, as he gently releases his hold on her powers. “Perfectly well. Though I imagine you’re a bit sore.” 

She snorts, pushing him away. “Nothing I can’t handle,” she slurs, in French. He can’t stop grinning, happy for how kind this future is, thankful he’s got a photographic memory and won’t soon forget how completely loopy she is, coming to. 

“Charles,” she drawls out, all vowel. “Happy anniversary, wheresit?” She’s grabbing at him with her clumsy hands, and he kisses her again. 

“So pushy, when I’m to wait months for my—Erika! I was joking,” he insists, rubbing his arm. She ignores him, pulls the gift from his pocket with an unsteady wave of her hand. 

It’s thin, simple chain. A pendant with a single dark pearl. 

He takes it from the air, places it around her neck.

“Happy anniversary,” he says, and he can’t help but tear up, himself, as she grips him desperately close.


	5. gold

He finds her, as always, out on the grounds with her own students. 

Erika’s students, unlike his own, are forever coming and going. Some she’ll see only once or twice, some will return at odd intervals. Her expectations are limited, it seems, to the moments they are here—that they show up and train, that they take the cause and each other seriously. 

The four students with her are suffering for it, today. It’s raining, as it has been all week, and it’s near to impossible for Charles to transverse the grounds for all the mud. He holds back on the path, watching her and the students. There’s two she’s working with directly, two hanging back and observing. Charles only recognizes the two sprawling careless on the soaking grass, only knows them—as ever—by the names they’ve chosen. He’s had enough interactions with Callisto to know she never has much pleasant to say to him, and Arclight never seems to have anything to say at all. He waits in silence for Erika. 

It drizzles on. In his coat pocket, the box weighs like a stone. He can’t stop fidgeting with it, overly aware of how it sits in his hand. He can’t help wondering if Erika’s sensed the contents already. But she keeps with her lecture, ignoring the chill, acknowledging him with a brief and curious glance. 

Truthfully, it is only the misery of this past week that steadies his nerves enough to stay. She looks as imperial as ever she did, even with her silver hair soaked and limp; looks all the better for her eventual decision to sacrifice the capes for shawls. Fifteen minutes pass, and the box grows heavier and he feels ridiculous for sitting out here like a lovesick fool, before she brings the session to an end. Waving off the students, she walks up the path to meet him. 

“What are you doing out here?” 

“I could ask you that, myself.” She’s older than him. They’ve both grown so old together. She should know better, too, and she hears the thought and smirks. 

“Perhaps so,” she admits, adjusting the shawl. “I suppose I can suffer to let you escort me home.” 

There’s an easiness to giving in to the banter, to just taking her at her word and walking her back to the mansion. They could dry off in the study before the fireplace, could carry on with a game of chess as they’ve done for years before this. 

But if he doesn’t ask now, he’ll never have the nerve. He tightens his hand around the box again, searching for the words, but Erika’s thoughts flare with surprise before he can speak. 

“Charles,” she says, stepping closer yet. The box twitches in his hand. “What do you have?”

He laughs, bringing his hand out of his pocket. Rain drops speckle the lid, and he opens it before she just pulls at the contents with her powers. 

“Why you ask questions to which you already know the answer, I’ll never know,” he says, unable to help himself. For a moment, she stands there in a shocked silence, staring incredulously at the ring. 

Then she seems to shake the mood off, and looks back at him. 

“You’re early.” 

It isn't _quite_ the reaction he was going for, considering he’s fifty years late. 

“It’s the fifth,” she tells him, when he says nothing. “A few weeks soon for the annual show of tokens.” 

“That’s not—” he starts, before sighing. It’s been about thirty years of this, her living with him and pretending she doesn’t care when he brings her the gifts, acting all superior when she’s still putting on the rubies or jade. 

“I never felt I asked you properly, before. So I’m asking, I’m wondering if you would…” he swallows, nervous as she just stares. “We never went to the Hoover dam. I thought we could maybe take a break from this abysmal weather. They built a bridge out that way, it’s incredibly tall, you would find it most—” 

“Charles,” she interrupts. “Quit stammering. I’m…” 

She pauses, herself, and straightens to look at some point, far off in the distance. 

“I don’t need to tell you my answer. I gave it to you a lifetime ago,” she says. “But I will say, I always wished it were this way.” 

Charles takes her hand, and she lets him. “I had always wished it had been different, then. That you married me, and didn't just brainwash a judge into wedding two men.” 

His hand grips at hers. His throat feels tight. All these years, and she’d never thought anything like that around him, he never knew that was how she saw that day. 

“I never married a man,” he tells her, though there’s little hope she’ll believe him, not even now. “And I’ll have to ‘brainwash,’ as you so kindly put it, the court again. They don’t do official vow renewals in Nevada.” The certificate reads her name, not what she’d been using back then. 

He’ll just convince the fine employees of Clark County to misplace a fifty-year-old record. Simple enough.

He clears his throat.

“Well. Shall we do it properly, this time?” he asks, letting her go for a moment to take the ring from the box. 

“Erika Lehnsherr, will you marry me?” 

She shakes her head, watching as he slides the ring on her finger. “You’re putting me on the spot,” she grouses. “Can’t even let me make you a ring, before asking.” 

He kisses the back of her hand, her skin delicate and beautiful with age. 

“Can I take that as a yes?”

“Of course it is,” she whispers. “It always has been. Yes, you fool. Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from _The Prophet_ by Khalil Gibran: 
> 
> _And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?_  
>  _But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,_  
>  _And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [But an Ecstasy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3643647) by [Red](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red/pseuds/Red)




End file.
